I think this is an attempt to break monopoly of those traditional PLCs. There are definitely going to be good use cases for ladder logic and "tried and true" pr

I think this is an attempt to break monopoly of those traditional PLCs. There are definitely going to be good use cases for ladder logic and "tried and true" programming model which was hasn't changed since 1990's. And in this case you are correct, the new Arduino makes little sense. But sometimes you want something more modern, that you can program in the same language your main product is in, and apply the same expertise and tooling you already have. I am not sure Arduino is the best option, given that their ecosystem is often very low quality, but there is definitely space for regular MCU in rugged case with protected I/O.